Bridging the Gap between Playwright and Peer-to-Peer Performer

 

For the past 27 years, I have been devising and refining a mechanism for ensuring the plays that I write to be performed by middle and high school students for their peers are as realistic, non-didactic, and accessible as possible. The issues that these plays explore—drug and alcohol abuse, racism and sexual intolerance, teen pregnancy, physical and emotional violence, and teen suicide—are difficult and complex; few people feel comfortable talking about root causes (otherwise known as “who and what is to blame”) and fewer still are willing to talk about their experiences. The #metoo movement that began on Facebook in 2017 and was spotlighted in the next year’s Golden Globe awards in the wake of widespread allegations of sexual harassment and abuse in the entertainment industry was a promising development and the past seven years have seen numerous arrests among the Hollywood elite and in other sectors. 

In 1998, I was hired to write the dramatic scenes for a musical called “The Think it Thru Revue,” which was funded by a large health care system in Arizona to provide education about sexual relations to a teenage population whose pregnancy rate was one of the highest in the country. Abstinence programs were not working. I knew that as a 29-year-old male I did not have the depth of insight needed to write a realistic, authentic play about teen sex in the late nineties. I knew what my own experiences were, more than a decade earlier, but that was nowhere near enough. The dominant pressures of the teens I was working with were in many ways the same—peer pressure is peer pressure through the ages, for the most part—yet I knew that burgeoning technologies and more permissiveness and opportunity were also making the pressures greater than what I had experienced. The play that we were contracted to write and perform would be attended by the governor of Arizona and the mayor of Phoenix, so there were plenty of high-level stakeholders waiting to see what we were going to do with such a loaded subject.

The first thing I did—and this has become an essential part of my process—was to talk to the young actors who would be in the theatre company we were forming for the project. There was a sufficient level of trust because of working together in classes and on traditional plays to create an honest and open dialogue about the issues surrounding teen sex. They also knew that my wife had been a teenage mother, which also created trust. From there, I created some scenarios based on what they were saying before holding a workshop where we had the company members play out the scenes. I video recorded them that first time, a practice I have since abandoned. I want things to be as real as possible without crossing any dangerous lines and even the best actor cannot be natural if they know the camera’s rolling.

I then did research—I had plenty of statistics at my disposal from funding agencies, sponsors, and other stakeholders. I also spoke to teenage mothers, past and present. The Abstinence versus Contraceptive debate was just beginning to rage and as I formulated the characters and plot of the play, I found myself right in the middle of it. We were denied a $10,000 grant that was available for plays that only promoted Abstinence, yet, because my gut was telling me that to honor our Company members and those they would be performing for, we couldn’t take a solely Abstinence stance. Abstinence was the choice of one of the couples in the story, but the other two couples represented the personal costs of teen pregnancy and HIV/AIDS. It is my belief that the best way to reach these audiences is to show them all possible scenarios and their outcomes. They are intelligent and more than capable of extracting the meaning from what they see.

We won several regional and national awards with “Think it Thru Revue” and the play toured Arizona and had performances in several other states for two and a half years. When we started New Mystics [now Seven Stories] Theatre Company in NJ in 2005, I rewrote the script to be a non-musical under the title “Thinkin’ it Over.” It toured for several years, with ongoing edits based on feedback from Company members, requests from hiring organizations, and the ever-changing times.

The past two decades I have spent working with co-directors and hundreds of talented performers have allowed me to refine our methods of creating new works continually using statistical and methods-based research, discussion sessions with Company members, and improvisation. My play “7 Reasons to Say No,” about drug and alcohol addiction, was created in the rehearsal space during many hours of rigorous improvising of scenarios where the Company members’ training in realistic portrayal and use of “impediments” (such as being high or drunk) was pushed to the absolute limits. The play’s research included many interviews with addicts, their families, counselors, and health care professionals.

In 2015, I worked with 15 members of our New Jersey company (in 2010 we had formed a West Virginia company) on generating material and ideas for a play about teen suicide, which is called “No One Hears Unless You Scream.” The scenarios we worked through were based primarily on a discussion moderated by our staff several months before. Three adult theatre educators took notes as a list of questions I had generated based on months of research were answered by a group of about 30 teenagers. The handwritten notes were sent to me and I created a dozen scenarios from them for the Company to improvise. I use three people to take notes because everyone hears different things and in different ways based on their own experiences.

During the improvisations, which I facilitated along with the artistic staff of the NJ Company, tears were shed and skills again pushed to the limit. No one has to remind any of us how serious this is. Eight teen suicides in a single New Jersey county in two and half years was reminder enough. Every person in the rehearsal space that day has been touched by suicide at least once in their lives, if not more. 

As Resident Playwright of the theatre company for two decades, it was my name that appears after the title, as I apply two decades of study, theory, and practice into writing the most honest, structurally sound, and compelling plays of which I am capable, but none of my skill and dedication to the end product would succeed without the honesty, trust, and talent of our Company members.

From 2018 through 2020, there were productions of “No One Hears Unless You Scream” in Colorado (two school tours) and Kentucky. The play has been performed or used in its entirety or in part in classrooms and in a variety of other venues in New Jersey, Connecticut, Ireland, and Israel. 

During that time, I was continually updating and otherwise revising the script based on new trends and challenges. Some schools rejected the play because it spreads the blame among school employees and parents as well as stemming from our society and culture and the immense pressure put on young people through social networking. There have been many times over the years that we have had to stand our ground and miss out on opportunities to reach new audiences because the gatekeepers wanted the plays watered down to the point where they would have no effect. “Because we say so” has never worked and never will.

If you would like to read “No One Hears Unless You Scream,” email me at joeymadiawriter@gmail.com

Over the past 21 years, these plays, along with “Voices of Violence,” a series of works that range from 3 minutes to 20 minutes, have reached around 70,000 audience members. The things we heard in our talkback sessions, or in letters and emails from performers and audience members, confirm that this process works and theatre can make a positive impact on the lives of young people when used in this way, combining the skills of veteran playwrights and directors with the passion, talent, and desire to tell their stories to their peers displayed by so many of the teenagers with whom I have worked. 

Seven Stories Theatre Company closed its doors in 2023.